


north star

by lagaudiere



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 16:20:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20820227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagaudiere/pseuds/lagaudiere
Summary: It feels like all the strings tying him to this town have snapped except for this one, like if he could just let go of loving Eddie (and that’s what it is, love, even if it still makes his stomach twist to think it) he could leave Derry like everyone else and never look back. He could be the kind of person who didn’t have nightmares about a voice from the sewers and a taunting laugh, who didn’t wake up drenched in sweat picturing Henry Bowers with a knife to his throat.But he can’t leave Eddie here, with his mother, can’t leave Derry until he knows Eddie will be alright. Otherwise, he thinks, what do those fucking initials carved into the kissing bridge even mean? He still walks by them sometimes, brushes his fingers over them like they’ll give him an answer about what Eddie wants. He was right, when he was thirteen and stupid-brave and carved those letters; no one ever knew.





	north star

**Author's Note:**

> The premise of this fic is "what if I changed or willfully misinterpreted every single thing about the clown movies so they didn't make me feel like banging my head into a wall." Definitely a few elements from scattered facts I've picked up about the book, but I didn't read it so don't @ me, I'm chilling. 
> 
> Related texts for further reading: "North Star" by the Rural Alberta Advantage, "Ocean Avenue" by Yellowcard, the spoken word part at the end of Taylor Swift's "Daylight" and the Jenny Holzer truism "In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy." 
> 
> Dedicated to clown chat

**part one **

When Eddie Kaspbrak is eleven years old, he starts having nightmares about hell. It’s not really the major topic of discussion in Sunday school class; they mostly talk about Jesus dividing the loaves and the fishes to give to his followers, healing the sick, being kind of the poor. That’s the Bible for kids. But at church it’s different; that’s the Bible for adults, and it comes with a red-faced elder thumping his hand on the podium.

The communion grape juice starts tasting strange to Eddie when he’s eleven. It takes like when you lose a tooth and the empty space is sore and bleeding; it takes like there’s something missing.

In his dreams about hell, he’s alone and surrounded by fire, he’s calling out to his mother or his friends but they’re not there and he knows, in the dream, that it’s because they decided not to be, because they left him alone. 

“Jews don’t believe in hell,” Stan says when Eddie tells him about those dreams. “Why would God want you to be tortured forever after you die?” 

“I don’t know,” Eddie says, kicking pointlessly at a rock. “There’s plenty of people who deserve it.” 

Eddie’s twelve years old and his mother is telling him about how dangerous New York City is, about drive-by shootings and people doing drugs on the subway and how you can get AIDS from public restrooms. 

“We don’t have AIDS in Derry, though, right?” Eddie says anxiously.

“Not  _ yet _ ,” his mother says darkly. “Derry’s a safe place. We don’t have those people here.” 

“What kind of people?” He’s biting the inside of his mouth and it takes like blood. Eddie has hated the sight of blood as far back as he can remember, but he’s gotten used to the metallic taste. 

“Homosexuals,” his mother says, almost absent-mindedly but with a tone that suggests Eddie will not ask any further questions if he knows what’s good for him. He does know, so he doesn’t ask. 

She’s right, probably. There aren’t any people like that in Derry. 

He’s thirteen and there’s a thing chasing after him, a diseased horrible thing that knows his name, and Eddie knows it’s going to catch up to him eventually. He just knows. 

He’s standing in a circle with his friends, and he somehow agreed to do this stupid blood oath, and Bill’s pocket knife is slicing cleanly across his hand. He still hates the sight of the blood more than the pain.  _ Wait,  _ Eddie wants to say,  _ this is dangerous, blood can get infected _ , but he knows that’s not how it works. None of them are sick. There’s definitely nothing foreign and dangerous in Eddie’s blood, even if sometimes it feels like there might be. Like there’s something under his skin that he doesn’t understand. 

He stands in the circle with his friends and presses his palm to Richie’s bleeding hand, and he doesn’t know it then but he’ll think of it sometimes, in later years. He’ll think that maybe there’s still a little bit of Richie’s blood running through his veins, and not know if he likes the idea or not, and bite his lip until it bleeds. 

—

Richie’s thirteen and all he wants to do is hold Eddie Kaspbrak’s hand. 

He keeps thinking about it; it just keeps coming into his head unbidden, when he’s alone with Eddie or when he’s with all of the losers. It’s stupid, he thinks, because there’s no reason why he should want to hold Eddie’s hand, Eddie’s obnoxious and has this shrill high-pitched girl’s voice and always acts like Ritchie’s best ideas are dumb and immature and anyway, none of that even matters because Ritchie’s not — 

Well. The thing that he doesn’t let himself think. 

It’s stupid because if anyone  _ was _ , it would probably be Eddie, he’s the one with the fanny pack and the girl’s voice, and Richie’s not like that. Except Henry Bowers calls him a  _ little fairy  _ in this voice that says it’s personal, like he knows it’s true, and maybe he does. Maybe he knows that Richie thinks about holding Eddie’s hand, has thought about kissing him before closing his eyes and making himself stop. Maybe he knows about how they all watched Bev strip down to her underwater and sure, it was  _ exciting,  _ but more because Richie knew he was seeing something he wasn’t supposed to than because he wanted, really wanted, to see it. 

It wouldn’t be impossible, if Henry Bowers did know. If he knew and he told everyone and then none of them, especially not Eddie, would ever look at Richie again. 

That summer, when they’re all fighting about the other thing Richie doesn’t want to think about, he can’t go back to the arcade anymore. He hates the thought of someone beating his Street Fighter high score, but it isn’t worth the risk. He thinks he’d take Bill punching him in the face a hundred times over being called those names.

Instead he bikes over to Eddie’s house once a day for a week, rehearsing speeches to give Mrs. K. about how sorry he is about what happened and how if she lets him see Eddie they’ll just do something quiet and non-disruptive like play checkers, which he thinks she would approve of. She slams the door in his face four days in a row. 

On his fifth attempt, Eddie opens the door instead, and Richie feels himself break into a grin he can’t suppress. “Eds! How the hell are you?” 

Eddie looks around nervously. “You can’t be here,” he says. 

“Come on, not even for a little bit?” It kills him how afraid Eddie looks. 

“No! She’s going to be back soon! Go away.”

Richie’s stomach twists. “Are — are you mad at me?” he asks, hating how tentative and small his voice sounds. 

Eddie rolls his eyes. “I’m not  _ mad  _ at you,” he says, like it’s obvious. “Maybe at Bill. You just can’t come over anymore, okay? Not until she gets over it.” 

“And how long is  _ that _ going to be?” 

“I don’t know. Maybe a long time.” Eddie bites his lip. “We’ll see each other at school, though. She can’t keep me from going to school. So we just have to wait ‘til the end of the summer.” 

“Okay,” Richie says, around a hard lump in his throat. He forgets to make it into a joke. He doesn’t say that it sometimes feels like they might not make it to the end of the summer. 

Richie bikes over the kissing bridge one night and sees a carving that wasn’t there before, “B + B” encircled by a heart. He can’t help laughing; it could’ve been carved by Ben or Bill or Beverly or none of them, and whoever it was probably thought it was some great romantic gesture but nobody will ever know what it means. 

_ Nobody would ever know _ , he thinks suddenly, and feels the weight of the knife he’s been carrying in his pocket. 

He doesn’t know why, but it suddenly seems very important that if he dies, if he doesn’t make it through this summer, there’s something left behind he decided for himself. 

—

Eddie’s fifteen and it already seems distant, what they did and what happened to them that summer, like it’s a dream or it happened to someone else. It’s just another thing Eddie doesn’t like to think about. 

The summer that they’re fifteen, Richie punches a guy in the jaw for calling Eddie queer, even though Richie’s been called that and worse plenty of times without doing a thing. He gets punched back so hard his nose is broken and tells his parents he tripped walking down the stairs. 

“Maybe when it heals it’ll be the right size for your face,” Eddie says, and Richie elbows him in the ribs, and they don’t talk about it. 

The summer they’re fifteen, Bill moves away from Derry, and promises repeatedly that he’ll stay in touch, write them all letters, while Stan twists his hands together and looks distraught. Eddie knows none of them have heard from Bev since she left. After a few months, none of them hear from Bill either. 

“Do you think something happened—“ Stan asks, and Eddie snaps, “Don’t be paranoid,” too harsh and abrupt to disguise his worry.

He doesn’t like to think about it. The list of things he doesn’t like to think about is only getting longer, the older he gets. He tells himself he’s only waiting until he’s old enough to get out of Derry and then he’ll leave all this behind, never think of it again. He can’t blame Bill for not writing. 

“Let’s play truth or dare,” Mike suggests one afternoon out at the clubhouse. They still go, sometimes — no one ever bothers them there. 

Eddie groans. “We’re way too old for that.” 

Richie grins wickedly from where he’s perched in the hammock like he owns the place, leafing through a stolen copy of Playboy. Eddie hates how he brings them here, like it’s some kind of impressive achievement just to get his hands on a picture of a naked girl. “It could be fun,” he says. “If we stick to dares.” 

Ben starts to say something, but Eddie talks over him before he can think. “We are not doing any stupid dares,” he snarls. Richie will try to get him to do something reckless and idiotic and it’ll end with Eddie getting tetanus or breaking a leg or being forced to streak across the football field. 

“You could just pick truth,” Stan says, nonchalant. 

“Yeah, if you’re a pussy,” Richie says, not looking up from the magazine, and Eddie really hates him sometimes, he really does. Hates the way he sometimes feels around him, which is mostly terrible if Richie’s looking at him but worse if he isn’t. 

“You know what I think, Richie?” he says. “I think you’re too scared to pick truth.” 

Richie laughs incredulously. “Yeah? What do you wanna know so bad, Eds? Go ahead, ask me anything.” 

“I will!” Eddie’s half yelling now, and the others are just watching the two of them uncomfortably, Ben muttering “not again” under his breath. Eddie should just laugh it off, move on, but he looks at Richie’s infuriating smirk and he just can’t. “So what’s the furthest you’ve ever gone with a girl, really? Not one of those made-up little stories about girls from other schools you act like we’re supposed to believe.  _ Really. _ ” 

Richie flinches, and Eddie regrets it immediately, knows he would have no idea what to say if anyone asked the same question of him. 

“Fuck you,” Richie spits, and he stands up, the magazine falling to the ground. “Why would you wanna know, anyway?” 

He’s halfway up the ladder before Eddie can begin to think of a response, and the rest of the losers club stare at Eddie like he’s waving around a gun. 

“What?” he snaps, and throws himself into the hammock in Richie’s absence, staring hard at the wall. “It’s not like we don’t all know he’s a fucking liar.” 

—

By senior year, Ben and Stan’s families have moved away from Derry. Stan does call Richie sometimes, the only one of the missing losers’ club members who does. He asks Richie how he’s doing like he really cares and when Richie tells him about his crazy plans, about how he’s going to California after graduation and never looking back, Stan laughs and says he believes it, that he’s sure Richie can do it. 

None of the three of them, Mike, Eddie, or Richie, want to go to senior prom. But Richie’s parents keep bringing it up, and Eddie’s mom downright insists. She finds him a date, even, some girl from their church, and when Eddie relays this information to Mike and Richie he looks like he might die of embarrassment. So Mike and Richie say they’ll go, for moral support.

Richie watches from the passenger seat of Mike’s shitty used car while Mrs. K. takes about forty thousand pictures of Eddie with his arm awkwardly around this girl. She’s got braces and acne that’s covered with caked-on makeup and stops people in the hallway to ask if they’ve gotten saved. Richie would laugh except that Eddie looks so genuinely miserable. 

He watches Eddie suffer through a few dances with her at the school gym and tries to blend artfully into the wall. He looks good, Eddie, in his stupid little suit with a bow tie that his mother definitely chose for him. Which is probably a sign of how far gone Richie is, more than anything. 

Eventually a girl comes by and asks Mike to dance, and Richie shrugs, giving him permission to go. He’s quietly grateful that no one asks him. 

“I’m going to kill my mother,” he hears Eddie’s voice hiss after a few more dances, and turns to see that he’s appeared at his elbow. He jerks his head at his date. “She’s talking to her youth group friends, keep an eye on her — I told her I’m getting punch. Don’t move.” 

He scuttles back into the crowd as soon as he’d come, and Richie watches him go with that familiar ache of fondness in his chest. 

It feels like all the strings tying him to this town have snapped except for this one, like if he could just let go of loving Eddie (and that’s what it is, love, even if it still makes his stomach twist to think it) he could leave Derry like everyone else and never look back. He could be the kind of person who didn’t have nightmares about a voice from the sewers and a taunting laugh, who didn’t wake up drenched in sweat picturing Henry Bowers with a knife to his throat. 

But he can’t leave Eddie here, with his mother, can’t leave Derry until he knows Eddie will be alright. Otherwise, he thinks, what do those fucking initials carved into the kissing bridge even mean? He still walks by them sometimes, brushes his fingers over them like they’ll give him an answer about what Eddie wants. He was right, when he was thirteen and stupid-brave and carved those letters; no one ever knew. 

“Listen,” Eddie hisses when he comes back with the cups of punch. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” 

Richie jolts. “What? You ditching your hot date?” 

“ _ God _ , yes.” Eddie jerks his head toward the door. “I already told Mike, he said he’s staying but I’m not wasting another fucking second here. Come  _ on,  _ Richie, we gotta go before she comes back.” 

He grabs Richie by the sleeve and pulls, and of course Richie goes with him. Always does. 

They end up at the old clubhouse, where they haven’t gone in two years. It’s covered with dust and spiderwebs. They pass the bottle of vodka that Richie, of course, snuck into the dance with him back and forth, and Eddie tells him about all the colleges he got into and how he can’t decide where to go. 

“I’m not going to college,” Richie says, confesses really. “After graduation, I’m going to Los Angeles. I’m gonna be a comedian. Or try, I dunno.”

Eddie stares at him for what feels like a full minute. “ _ God _ , you’re stupid,” he says sincerely. 

Richie laughs, unexpectedly hard, his body shaking with it. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe I am.” 

“I’ll miss you,” Eddie says after a minute. It’s small, quiet, but it’s enough to make Richie’s heart thump painfully in his chest. “I… when we don’t see each other every day. I’ll miss you.” 

He looks over and sees Eddie curled on one of the crates they used for seats, hugging his knees to his chest and looking as wretchedly unhappy as he did at the dance. “What’s wrong?” Richie says seriously, sitting up. 

Eddie exhales a hard, frustrated breath. “I don’t know,” he says. “I just keep thinking… what if I leave and I’m not any different? What if I go to college and I’m still…  _ me _ ?” 

He says it with so much hatred that it shocks Richie for a moment, enough that he forgets not to be sincere. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” 

“Shut up.” Eddie’s eyes are glassy with barely restrained tears. “There’s about a hundred things wrong with me.” 

Richie swings down from the hammock, crosses over to sit on the crate next to him and put his hand gently on Eddie’s shoulder. “Well, sure you’re kind of a loser, Eds,” he says. “You could stand to chill out a little and maybe like, get laid, but —“ 

He cuts himself off because Eddie seizes both of his shoulders and stares him straight in the eye. “Richie,” he says, “shut  _ up _ ,” and, unbelievably, Eddie kisses him.

—

Eddie’s never kissed anyone before and he’s definitely doing it wrong. He can tell because Richie completely freezes when he does it, although maybe that’s just because he doesn’t want to be kissing Eddie at all. Maybe this was a terrible fucking idea. Richie’s lips are chapped. It’s weird to be able to tell by touch. Eddie feels like maybe he’s going to stop breathing. 

“Uh,” he says. “Sorry, I—“ and he starts to pull away, but Richie catches his hand.

“No, no,” he says. “No, don’t be sorry. Please.”

“Okay.” Eddie’s resisting the urge to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. 

“Can we do that again?” Richie says, and he sounds — oh. He sounds like he means it, like he wants to. 

Eddie curls his fingers into the fabric of Richie’s stupid tuxedo t-shirt and kisses him again, closed mouthed and carefully, and feels Richie kiss him back, the corners of his lips turning up into a smile. It’s  _ weird _ .

But it’s good too. It feels like the most natural thing in the world, really. He could swear his heart is beating slower, like he’s more relaxed, which isn’t how that’s supposed to go, probably, except then Richie pulls him closer, tangles a hand into his hair, and he feels it speed up again. 

“I didn’t really tell Mike we were leaving the dance,” he says abruptly, breaking away. 

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up. “What, you just wanted to get me alone that bad?” 

“Maybe.” He thinks this, the old clubhouse, is probably the only place in Derry they could do this. The only place they wouldn’t have to worry about anyone seeing. 

Richie grins, looking genuinely smug. “ _ Cute _ ,” he says, and he kisses Eddie again and all Eddie can think is that he wishes they could do this forever, stay in this quiet place where there’s nothing but the two of them and no one can say a fucking thing about it. 

“ _ Eds, _ ” Richie whispers. He sounds dazed, and he pulls back a little, gives Eddie an unexpectedly serious look. “Hey. You know you could, uh.” He adjusts his glasses with an unsteady hand. “You could come to California with me.” 

Eddie’s heart drops into the pit of his stomach. “I can’t go to California,” he says. 

“Okay, but like — why not?” 

“Because I  _ can’t _ !” His hands drop to his sides and he feels them clench into fists, nails biting into his skin. “Because people don’t  _ do  _ that, Richie, they don’t just go to California because they don’t want to deal with their lives.” 

Richie blinks at him. “ _ Oh _ -kay. So, what, you’re going to stay in Maine your whole life so your mom doesn’t freak out?”

“I didn’t say that,” Eddie snarls. “What would I do in fucking California?” 

Richie’s eyes are still soft. Eddie bites the inside of his lip, and regrets it immediately when the familiar metallic taste of blood washes out the feeling of having been kissed. “Not everywhere’s like Derry,” Richie says. “Somewhere else, we could — you know. It’d be different.” 

He can’t explain why just the thought of that fills him with panic. Not everywhere is Derry, but nowhere’s  _ safe _ . 

He was supposed to leave, he was supposed to make a clean break and get away from all this, but this is the thing that doesn’t fit, right, this is the thing he can’t get away from. Richie always made him so goddamn  _ nervous _ .

“I can’t,” he says, and he watches Richie’s eyes as they look away from him, look down at the floor. 

“You kissed _ me _ , though.” 

“I know. I’m sorry.” 

Richie stands up. “ _ Fuck. _ ” He laughs bitterly, shaking his head. “Yeah. I think I better go.” 

And when he’s gone, Eddie buries his head in his hands and suppresses a scream. 

—

Mike drives him to the airport; Richie’s parents, furious about the whole “not going to college” thing, had refused to. He has one bag and a plane ticket and a decent amount of money he saved up bagging groceries for the last three years. No clue what he’s going to do when he gets there. 

“Not too late to come with me, you know,” he tells Mike, half-seriously. 

Mike shakes his head. “Somebody’s got to stay in Derry,” he says, completely seriously. 

“Well. Thank god it’s not gonna be me, that’s all I can say.”

They hug goodbye; Richie tries to make it a brief, masculine back-slapping thing, but Mike doesn’t let go for a long moment, and he doesn’t mind. No point in pretending he does. 

He gets almost to the front of the security line before he hears a voice calling out behind him, sharp and piercing. He’d know it anywhere.  _ “Richie Tozier!”  _

Eddie’s standing in the doorway of the airport terminal, and he looks furious, which for some inexplicable reason is how Richie has always loved him the most. For a wild moment he thinks Eddie is about to reenact the stupidest possible romcom trope, run over and beg, plead with Richie not to go. Richie picture them falling into each other’s arms, kissing in front of all these strangers. 

Instead Eddie just stands there, waiting for Richie to come to him, and with a mumbled, “sorry” Richie slips out of line and does it. 

“You didn’t tell me when you were leaving,” Eddie says. “I had to find out from your  _ father _ .” 

“Sorry,” Richie says again. “I’m — not the best at goodbyes.” 

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, and pulls Richie into a tight embrace. He says it again into his shoulder, and again, and they’re standing there holding onto each other for the longest moment. It doesn’t even occur to Richie to pull away. 

Eddie does, eventually, though, and he still looks angry and sad and a little of something else Richie doesn’t have a name for. “I’ll call you,” Eddie says. “And you’ll call me. We’ll still talk all the time, we’re not going to lose touch.” It’s an order, not a question, and God, Richie loves him. Will love him in California or anywhere else he could ever go, will love him even if Eddie never calls him again. 

“Of course,” Richie says, and then, because he can’t resist, “I’ll ask your mom to put you on the line when we’re done talking,” with an eyebrow waggle that makes Eddie laugh and punch him in the shoulder. 

“Okay,” he says. “Go. Don’t forget about me when you’re famous.”

“Never,” Richie promises, and he’s completely convinced of the truth of it.   
  


**part two**

Eddie’s thirty years old and he hates being such a fucking cliche. 

When his mother dies, he doesn’t cry for weeks. She asked to be cremated, so he shoves her ashes into a box into the back of his closet and doesn’t look at them. 

_ I hated her _ , he tells himself a million times.  _ I hated her and now I’m finally free _ . 

It doesn’t feel that way. He did hate her, most of the time. She had given him one semester of freedom before moving to the town where he’d gone to college, insisting they needed to stay together. Look out for each other. She’d tried to influence every aspect of his life and he’d fought it, or tried to, but so often it was easier to just give in. 

But he loved her too, he thinks, for whatever value of love. They only ever had each other. 

In the last days of her life she kept telling him to get married, holding onto his hand too tight, eyes filled with tears. “Promise me you’ll find a nice girl,” she said. “Promise me. I always wanted that for you.” 

“Sure, Mom,” he’d said, because it was easier. “I will.” 

He suspected she would have hated any nice girl he was interested in, but it had never mattered because he wasn’t interested in nice girls. It barely mattered what he was interested in, because it was surprisingly easy to get to age thirty without having a significant relationship at all, if you just didn’t try. 

There was a guy in college, a tall guy with glasses who made Eddie so intensely nervous that he resorted to starting fights with him every day of their sophomore English class. They’d walk out into the hallway together still arguing. They were friends for a long time, until they were sitting together on the bed in his dorm room and he put a hand on Eddie’s knee and said, “Do you ever think about—“ and Eddie jumped up like he’d been scalded. 

Not because he hadn’t wanted to. He just couldn’t. 

After that, there was nothing except a few one-night stands that he felt terrible about afterward, not least because of how drunk he had to get to go through with them. 

_ She’d kill me if she knew _ , Eddie used to think. Poison slipped in among his pills. But now he thinks maybe she did know, always. She just didn’t want to discuss it. 

So he’s thirty and he’s alone and he really hates himself for that, for being an unhappy gay man in New York City who had a weird, fucked-up relationship with his mother. Jesus.

A few months after she dies, he goes to church again for the first time in years. He doesn’t remember much about going when he was a child, but there’s something about it all that’s comfortingly familiar. He likes the music, mostly, and the ritual.

He keeps going. He doesn’t really believe in God, especially not the benevolent God these people are talking about, but it’s something in his life that isn’t totally consumed with work. It’s nice to have somewhere where he isn’t expected to do anything but smile and sing along.

He meets Myra at church; she’s handing out coffee in the basement after service to a long line of elderly people. She smiles when she sees him, and he thinks that she has a friendly face. Familiar. 

“We don’t get too many people our age in here,” she tells him, handing over the styrofoam cup. “I’m Myra. Can I get you a donut?” 

“Oh, I can’t,” he says. “Gluten sensitivity.” Remembering himself, he adds, “I’m Edward Kaspbrak. Eddie.” 

She grins at him, stepping out of the line. “Let’s find you a gluten-free donut, Eddie.” 

-

The thing is that Richie did everything right. 

He took the improv classes and he played the basement shows that five people came to, paid his dues, spent his days handing out fliers on street corners and trying to do it in a way that seemed funny. He worked shitty jobs and lived in shitty apartments and hustled, non-stop. He started to get bit TV parts and sell out shows and it felt like a miracle. He was on a mediocre sketch show that got cancelled and the writing staff for a more-mediocre late-night show that tried to make the news seem like comedy. He did everything right until a man in a nice suit came up to him one night, after a show, stuck out a hand to shake and said, like he’d always imagined, “Richie Tozier, I think I can make you a star.” 

“There’s just one thing,” his new agent, Aaron, said a couple of beers later. “You’ve got great stage presence. People like you. But you’ve got to change your material.” 

“What’s wrong with my material?” 

“It’s too impersonal. I’ve never heard a comic start fewer sentences with ‘I.’ You need to write jokes about yourself.” 

It’s a surprise — it always surprises Richie, somehow, when people don’t see it on his face that there’s something essential missing from him, that he doesn’t remember the things most people remember — first kiss, first time getting drunk, senior prom — that there’s no there there. 

“I can’t do that,” he says. 

Aaron shrugs. “Well, most comics don’t love this idea, but I can always get people to write it for you.” 

His friends, the people he performs with, would call it selling out. A deal with the devil. But to Richie it just feels like an escape. 

—

“It’s a classic symptom of a traumatic brain injury,” Eddie tells the psychologist who’s sitting across from him. “Retrograde amnesia. People  _ remember  _ their childhoods, they have specific memories, it’s not  _ normal— _ “ 

“You’re right,” she says gently. “It’s not. But there’s no evidence on your scan of a brain injury, Mr. Kaspbrak. We have to consider other causes. Psychiatric causes.”

Eddie laughs. “What, so they sent you in here to tell me I’m crazy?” 

“Not crazy, no. But you have a long history of visiting the hospital seeking diagnoses for conditions you don’t have. Some people would see that as drug-seeking behavior, Mr. Kaspbrak, but I think you’re just looking for help.” She gives him a measured look over glasses. “We can discuss the root causes of this.” 

“How am I supposed to discuss the  _ root causes  _ if I don’t  _ remember— _ “ Eddie cuts himself off, suddenly losing the energy to argue about this anymore. “Fine. Fine,” he says, ripping off the hospital bracelet on his wrist. “I’ll get a second opinion. Thank you.” 

But he’s already had a second opinion, and a third, fourth and fifth. All the doctors tell him that there’s nothing medically wrong with him, but he’s the one who has to live inside of his own body, his own mind. He knows there’s something wrong. It’s bothered him for years, the not-remembering, but it’s worse lately. Like something is making him look at the absence. 

He tells Myra, because he doesn’t know who else to tell. It’s the fourth time they’ve gotten coffee together and she’s caught him staring off into space distantly, not hearing a word she says. She knows nothing about his life, about who he used to be before the nice car and the nice job and before he went to church every Sunday. She’s maybe his only friend.

Across the table, she covers his hand with hers. If he turned it over, they’d be holding hands, but he doesn’t, and she closes her fingers around his wrist. 

“That sounds really serious,” she says. 

“It is. I think it is. But they don’t want to hear it, they don’t listen.” 

“Who’s going to take care of you, Eddie?” she says sadly, and he hears it, he hears his mother’s voice,  _ who else is going to take care of you? You’re delicate, Eddie, you know that.  _

“I don’t. I can take care of myself—“ 

She shakes her head, purses her lips. “You can for now, but what if you get sick? Who’s going to make decisions for you if you’re in the hospital, if you can’t do it yourself?” 

There is no one else, and she knows that. No other family. His mother’s dead, the rest of them are dead too, or at least Eddie thinks so. He doesn’t remember. He’d alienated everyone he had half a chance at a real relationship with until he stopped trying. 

Myra’s still holding onto his wrist. “You know, I could help you,” she says. “Eddie, you know I care about you. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to take care of you? Someone who’d always be there?” 

Someone who’d always be there. He’s having visions of fainting in the bathroom, reaching for his inhaler, head cracking against the porcelain sink. Blood, blood everywhere. He always gets sick at the sight of blood, always has. 

What they have is almost like a relationship, even though they don’t kiss in the doorway or go home together at the end of the night. Eddie hasn’t been to bring himself to fake those things, but he knows how easy it would be if he just would.

“What do you mean?” he says. 

Myra smiles sickly sweet. “Well,” she says as if the idea has just occurred to her, “we could get married.” 

—

Aaron takes Richie out to dinner on his fortieth birthday and doesn’t mention that it’s pathetic there’s no one he’s spending the night with other than his agent. They go to a bar afterwards, and Richie hopes it isn’t just out of pity, knows it probably is. He stays anyway, keeps drinking and talking about how much it fucking sucks to be forty years old. 

“You’ve got a lot to be proud of, you know,” Aaron says reproachfully. “Your special’s doing great numbers. I get offers for you all the time.” 

“For what, another movie where I have to wear old age makeup and do shit that legally qualifies as sexual harassment? No thanks.” 

Aaron sighs. “Maybe you’re just lonely, Rich, you know?” 

_ “You’re such a stereotype.” _ That was what the last guy he was with had said. Although they weren’t really together, not outside of Richie’s apartment anyway. He’d spent his twenties trying to date women and then spent his thirties being paranoid as hell about what would happen if anyone found out his whole public persona was fifty percent ghostwriting, fifty percent lies, held together with alcohol and bravado. 

_ “Always feeling sorry for yourself. The whole sad clown act, it’s pathetic.”  _

Richie always went for smart guys, guys who snapped back at every one of his lines and reminded him, in some way he couldn’t place, of home. They were smart enough that it never took any of them longer than three months to realize there was something wrong with him. 

“I’m fine,” Richie said, taking another sip of bourbon. 

“Are you?” Aaron says. “Because my clients who are fine usually don’t spend this much time with me.” 

“Fuck you, man,” Richie says, lightly, and Aaron laughs a little. 

They’re the only two people in the bar, and it’s late, and Aaron is looking at him like this conversation really means something, like it’s not just business. It’s intense, that look. And Richie, because he’s always trying not to do the stupid thing but not trying hard enough, leans over and kisses him. 

Aaron leans back immediately, winces. 

The sting of self-hatred is immediate and sharp. Aaron’s married, got two kids, a boy and a girl. They’re adorable. And Richie is such a fucking loser. 

“See what I mean?” Aaron says, with forced lightness. “You gotta meet someone.” 

“I don’t —“ Richie doesn’t know what to say. “Sorry.” 

“It’s okay. You know that, right? I know you had some kind of shitty childhood you don’t like to talk about, but it’s not exactly the end of the world if you’re —“ 

“Shut up.” Richie sets down his glass too forcefully; it rattles hard against the table. “The only thing I am is drunk.”

—

Eddie does not want to go back to Derry.

He absolutely does not want to, and it’s the most idiotic thing he’s ever fucking heard that Mike, who he hasn’t talked to since he was in high school, thinks Eddie will just drop everything in his life and go back to the shittiest town in the entire state of Maine. 

He doesn’t want to go, except that he tells Myra about the phone call when he’s just gotten off the phone with the insurance agent about his car, and she says, “Well, you’re not doing  _ that _ .” 

Eddie grits his teeth. “Why not?” 

“Because you’ll miss the Rotary Club raffle night on Wednesday! Besides, I worry about you when you go out of state by yourself.” 

Suddenly, the only thing that seems worse than going back to Derry is attending the fucking Rotary Club raffle, and he says so, and they end up hissing passive-aggressively at each other for about forty minutes, which is how this always ends. 

“Jesus, Myra,” Eddie snaps, “when did you start expecting me to pretend to be your fucking trophy husband?”

She glares at him. “You are my husband.” 

“I can’t do this right now.” He turns on his heel and walks down the hallway. “I’m going to Derry.”

This begins to seem like a more and more ill-considered idea that further he drives down the highway, seething with anger and listening to Audie Cornish talk about the national debt. By time he crosses the border into Maine, he’s starting to remember things he hasn’t thought about in years. 

The paper is one of the first things Eddie sees when he gets to Derry, at the CVS on the edge of town where he stopped because his head hurts like hell and he’s out of ibuprofen. It’s a huge block headline on the front page,  _ three teens arrested in murder, suspected hate crime _ , and he’s sick to his stomach immediately.

He picks up the paper, scans the centerpiece article about these teens, these kids, chasing down two men they saw kissing at the carnival, beating one of them to death. Dismemberment, the paper says, grim and vague. 

And Eddie’s first thought is,  _ how could they be so careless, didn’t they know it’s not safe, not here in Derry _ , and he hates himself for it immediately. 

“Hey,” says the teenage girl behind the checkout counter, “you gonna buy that?” 

“No,” Eddie says, and shoves the paper back into place. “No, sorry.” 

—

The minute Richie sees Eddie again it’s like deja vu but worse. It’s like somebody put a photo filter over the last twenty-seven years of his life and now it all looks different, it all makes sense. Celine Dion might as well start playing over the restaurant’s speakers, because it’s all coming back to him now. 

Eddie looks good. He looks different, obviously, and he looks tired, but it’s still him, and Richie kind of can’t believe he forgot so much about him. Must just not have wanted to remember, he thinks, because wasn’t there something that happened before graduation, something they fought about… 

He remembers a lot of shit, though. He remembers carving their initials on that bridge where horny teens went to make out.  _ Jesus _ . How old was he, thirteen? 

“You got married?” he hears himself saying. “Like, to a woman?” Like he doesn’t know, like he didn’t look everyone up on Facebook before coming here and see Eddie’s tagged photos with a woman who sells scented candles for a pyramid scheme. Fuck, he’s an idiot. He’s an idiot and he needs to do more shots, now. 

“I listened to your internet radio thing,” Eddie says a few rounds of drinks in. 

“What? It’s called a podcast, Eds. My god, you sound ancient.” 

“Well, I listened to it. They pay you for that shit? Talking about what bars you’ve thrown up in and your philosophy on comedy and all that crap?” 

Richie grins. He hasn’t done the show in years; it was back before podcasts really needed to be about anything, when people would just listen to comics yammer at each other about any dumb thing. He never made that much money on it, but Eddie doesn’t need to know that.

“People like listening to me talk now,” he says. “They pay for the privilege.”

Eddie snorts. “It sounded like you hadn’t changed at all since you were thirteen years old.” 

“You remembered that much about me?” 

He wishes he remembered more about Eddie. The emotions are there but all the details are fuzzy. He doesn’t know if he said something stupid, if he did something he should regret. 

“Some, yeah… I guess it’s because I was in New York and you were all the way out in California. You never invited me to any of your shows,” Eddie says, mock hurt, a hand over his heart. 

“‘Cause I didn’t remember you existed! I’m sorry, Eds, I wish I had. I could’ve gotten so much good material out of you,” Richie says, and then adds, nonsensically, “You didn’t invite me to your wedding.” 

Eddie looks away. “I don’t think you would’ve come.” 

Richie’s almost grateful when Mike starts talking about a bunch of shit that doesn’t make any sense, because at least he doesn’t have to think about Eddie. He’s almost grateful, for a minute. 

—

They’re back at the motel and Eddie is watching Richie fumble with the key in the lock of his motel room. Eddie’s pretty drunk, he thinks, hasn’t been this drunk in a while. Richie obviously is too. Mike could’ve at least told them about all this insane bullshit before they got fucking wasted. 

“Rich?” Eddie says, looking over at him from the doorway of the next room, and Richie drops his key. 

“Shit! Jesus.” 

“Richie, can I ask you something?” Eddie says. His voice sounds oddly calm, like he wasn’t freaking out minutes before, like they shouldn’t all be freaking out way more than they even are. 

“What?” Richie snaps, but the alcohol makes Eddie keep talking. He wants to know what it is that Richie is so obviously nervous about, what it is he isn’t saying. There’s something about Richie that’s missing from his memory, and it feels important. 

“Were you in love with Stan?” says Eddie.

Richie laughs — laughs like he’s been punched and had the breath knocked out of him. “What? What kinda fucking question is that, Eddie, was I in love with Stan? No.” 

He sounds a little panicked, but sincere enough. For some reason it’s the answer Eddie wanted to hear. 

He has a lot of memories about Richie. He always remembered him, vaguely, would see him in a magazine or the “recommended for you” Netflix category and feel a vague connection:  _ we went to high school together _ . 

Now, he can picture Richie flicking balled-up bits of paper at him across the room during algebra class, trying to distract him. Pushing Richie’s head underwater in the water at the quarry, laughing. Sitting next to each other in a dark movie theater, watching  _ Batman Returns _ and Richie could never sit still, always elbowing him in the ribs and leaning into his space. 

Eddie looks away. “Sorry,” he says. “That was — I shouldn’t have said anything, I just, I know you guys kept in touch after he left Derry —“ 

“We were friends,” Richie says. “Not fuckin’, dating.” 

Forty is too old to feel like this. It’s too goddamn old. 

Eddie shakes his head. “Forget I said anything. We need to get out of here.” 

“Yeah.” Richie tries the key again and it opens this time, and Eddie tries to refocus the panicky, drunk state of his mind on the fucking _ evil clown _ that’s going to kill and eat them all. “Yeah, we do.”

—

Mike says to split up, that they have to find their artifacts alone or whatever he’s saying that sounds like someone bullshitting the script to a sequel to  _ Avatar _ , which Richie slept through most of. They split up, the classic move that always works out in horror movies and episodes of Scooby Doo, and Richie shakes his head, wondering if any of the rest of them have a clue what genre they’re currently living in. 

He doesn’t know if there’s anything left in Derry that ever belonged to him. Maybe a couple stolen copies of Playboy somewhere in the woods, but those wouldn’t be a terribly meaningful sacrifice.

He can’t stop thinking about Eddie asking him if he was in love with Stan. It was both off-base enough to be hysterical and way, way too close for comfort. It’s like it’s too close to the surface here, like everyone can read in on his face. The way they did when he was a kid and Henry Bowers was shoving him to the ground because he’d done something wrong he couldn’t even identify. 

What he wanted to say was,  _ It wasn’t Stan, you idiot, you moron, it was you. It was always you because you were the one who could keep up with me and you were the one who came back with something worse for every name I called you and the one I wanted to protect and I thought you might, I thought you might be like me. You never knew that?  _

He didn’t know it was Eddie, for all those years, but it was and he knows it now. 

“We’re going to die here, you know,” a voice says from behind him, and he realizes Eddie is following him. 

Richie shrugs, an affected indifference. “Seems like it’s maybe too late to back out now.” 

“I mean it, Richie.” Eddie’s voice is poisonous, a sharp scold that makes Richie feels thirteen again. “Did you even see the newspaper when you got here? That man’s  _ arm  _ was ripped off. You think that was a coincidence?” 

He had seen the newspaper. It had made him remember, suddenly and violently, Henry Bowers, which was enough to want to leave Derry immediately all on its own. “It said it was a hate crime.”

“Yeah. And I’m sure Pennywise coming back had nothing to do with it.” Eddie catches up with him, and Richie sees how scared he really looks. “I don’t know about the rest of them, maybe they can fight it off or, or something, but if you and me stay here, we’re going to die,” Eddie says quietly. His voice is absolutely convinced. 

Richie doesn’t know what he means by that, and he doesn’t offer any elaboration. 

There’s something different about him, Richie thinks, and of course he’d be different after twenty years, but it’s like all the sharp-edged defiance Eddie had when they were kids is gone, replaced by just fear and directionless anger. Like someone sanded down all of his edges, succeeded where his mother hadn’t in finally beating him into submission. 

Whoever it was, Richie hates them for it. 

“We’re not going to die,” he says, and maybe half believes it. “I mean, come on, man. It’s just a fucking clown.” 

—

The first place Eddie goes to look for his “artifact,” as Mike calls it, isn’t the pharmacy. That’s the first place he thinks of, but as soon as he does he tells himself that it’s not right. Can’t be that, he doesn’t have any positive memories of that place. 

There aren’t a lot of places in Derry he has positive memories of. Not the house where he grew up, that’s for damn sure. But he liked going to church, when he was younger. Liked the stories and the songs. 

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting to find, but he drives out to the Methodist church and lets himself in through the front door. There’s no one there when he calls out, so he wanders among the pews and then up to the alter. Maybe they just need a Bible and they can perform an exorcism. That might as well be what happens. 

He’s not going to find his token, he thinks, because he doesn’t remember everything. There’s something that’s missing, something important.

_ “There’s nothing for you here, Eddie _ ,” a whispery voice calls out to him, and he freezes. 

_ “You’re not supposed to be here,”  _ the voice whispers.  _ “Don’t you feel how hot it’s getting?”  _

He does, suddenly. He can feel himself starting to sweat. “Jesus,” Eddie mutters, and slowly forces himself to turn around. 

There’s something sitting in the front row. It’s a corpse, he realizes with dawning horror, its face rotting and dripping off its skull. It’s wearing the vestments of a Methodist elder — Eddie recognizes him as he remembers, it’s the elder who stood in front of this same church thirty years also, whose sermons about hell used to scare him so badly he’d close his eyes and shrink into his mother’s side. 

The thing grins and stares directly at him. “Oh, Eddie,” it says. “Aren’t there a few things you forgot to confess?” 

Eddie’s breath is starting to feel restricted, his chest tight.  _ No,  _ he thinks,  _ it’s not real _ , and he takes off running. 

_ “That’s right, go,”  _ the voice says as he sprints through the doors, like it’s following him or talking directly into his head.  _ “Go find the thing that’ll make it all better.”  _

—

“Richie.” Ben won’t stop knocking on his door. “Rich, come on, I know you’re in there. We have to talk.” 

Richie flings open the door just to get him to shut up, because there can’t be anything more annoying than Ben’s plaintive voice. “We’re not talking,” he says. “I’m leaving.”

“Come on, man.” Ben looks miserable. “You heard Mike, we all have to be here and do this together, or…” 

_Or what_, Richie thinks hysterically, _I’ll_ _end up slitting my wrists in a bathtub? _He’s pretty sure he’ll take his chances with wanting to die over actually, definitely dying. “Look, maybe you feel like you have to make up for not being cool in middle school, but just go to the next class reunion,” he says. “I have a life. I’m going back to it.” 

Ben, all broad-shouldered and imposing now, is blocking the door. “Do you like your life?” 

Richie rolls his eyes. “Jesus. Yeah, I fucking love it. I’m rich and I get invited to the Emmys. Is that not the answer you wanted to hear?” 

Ben shakes his head disapprovingly. “I think we all came back for something. If we hadn’t, we would have just ignored those phone calls.” He stares Richie down. “I can admit that I came back for Bev. What about you?”

_ Don’t pretend you know me _ , Richie wants to say,  _ don’t pretend you know what it’s like _ . But he can hear footsteps downstairs, some kind of commotion, and he’d really like to just end this conversation and get out of here. 

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll stay.” 

“You mean it?” 

“Promise.” He gives a weak smile. “You should probably get down there, I’ll come down in a minute.”

He bolts the second Ben is gone. 

He fully intends to drive out of Derry and not look back, hoping he’ll forget everything again as soon as he hits the highway. But he drives, instead, to the town’s only synagogue, where he sits alone and wishes more than anything that Stanley — who really did know him, who would know what to say — was here. 

—

Eddie can barely see through the pain, and Bev’s trying to bandage the knife wound on his cheek. 

“Don’t fucking touch me!” he snaps, shrinking back against the wall, when her fingers almost graze his bloodied face, and Bev reels back like she’s been hit. 

“Sorry, Bev,” Eddie says, and he means it. 

“It’s okay.” Her voice wavers, though. It isn’t. 

It’s an old fear, that horror he felt when he saw blood. This idea that there’s some kind of horrible infection there that no test could ever detect. And the rational part of Eddie knows it’s not true. It’s just that the irrational part of him is a lot stronger, especially now, when he can still feel those leper’s fingers around his throat. 

He thinks of his mother insisting he stay home from school on days he felt perfectly fine.  _ You’re contagious, darling, you don’t want to get anyone else sick.  _ He thinks of telling Myra, tentatively, about some stupid thing he wanted to do by himself — some movie or art show, he can’t remember — and of her instantly replying,  _ I’ll go with you.  _ She counts out his pills for him every morning. Won’t let him do it himself. He’s suddenly seized with the worry that they were all just placebos. 

He’s got five missed calls from Myra on his phone and he’s going to die here in Derry, he knows it. The thing that’s been chasing him his whole life has a name and a face now, but that just makes it more certain that it will catch him and kill him. 

Beverly hands him the gauze and he presses it over the wound himself. His mouth is never going to stop tasting like blood. 

“I’m sick,” he says, by way of explanation, and they don’t ask him to elaborate. 

—

_ “Richie,” Eddie had said, “I think I killed it, I think I figured out how to kill it,” and then it was behind them and Richie was still dazed from the deadlights but had seen it happening just moments before, a vision of the worst possible outcome. He lurched forward, knocked them both across the ground in the same moment that it struck and one of its horrible spider legs pierced through Eddie’s arm, the same arm he’d broken when they were kids, and into his side, then withdraw with a sickening sound, and Richie was screaming at it, “get the fuck away from him!”, the others rounding on it but he was looking at Eddie and there was a lot of blood. Blood everywhere.  _

_ “You’re okay,” Richie said, desperately wanting to believe it.  _

_ Eddie, very slightly, shook his head. “I don’t know if I am.”  _

_ “You are. You are, just hold on.” _

_ Eddie’s eyes fluttered closed, then opened again, deliberately. “Richie. You know… you know I…”  _

_ “Shut up.” His voice was shaking but he wouldn’t let him say it, not here, not like this. He remembered everything now, remembered the night of senior prom and the way Eddie had looked at him. Was looking at him now. “Tell me when we get out of here, Eds, tell me then.”  _

_ “I remember,” Eddie said, and didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence. “Richie, I remember.”  _

_ Richie stifled a sob. “Yeah. Yeah, me too.”  _

_ Eddie’s eyes were very wide. “I almost killed it,” he said. “The leper. I had my hands around its throat, and I almost… I made it small.” _

They’d killed the fucking clown, finally, and Richie nearly tripped over his feet running back to Eddie’s side, feeling for a pulse. His eyes are closed; he isn’t obviously breathing. There’s what might be a heartbeat, but maybe Richie is just imagining— 

No. No, it’s there. It has to be. 

“Rich, this place is falling apart,” Ben says. “I don’t know if we’re going to make it out—“

“Shut up,” Richie snaps. “If only five of us making it out of this is good enough for you, then just go, but it’s not fucking good enough for me.” He looks around at them, covered in gore and blinking at each other, frozen, and then Beverly steps forward. 

“We can do this,” she says, and pulls Eddie’s uninjured arm around her shoulder. “Let’s go.” 

They stagger out, Richie and Beverly supporting Eddie and the others surrounding them in a kind of protective barrier, onto the street. They make it, all six of them, and Mike’s on the phone with 911 the second they’re outside, as the Neibolt house crumbles away into ash. 

“You’re okay,” Richie tells Eddie’s unconscious form, as he and Bev lower him gently down onto the grass. He’s trying not to touch Eddie anywhere that he’s bleeding, but it’s always bad when you move someone who’s injured, right? Always make it worse. “You’re okay, you’re going to be okay.” 

He keeps saying it until the ambulance comes, and Mike is saying something to the paramedics that’s probably all lies, Richie can’t hear it, and even though he knows better Beverly has to unpeel his fingers from where they’re clutching tightly to Eddie’s bloodstained polo shirt, pull him away so they can get Eddie onto the stretcher. 

One of the paramedics is giving him a strange look, and he doesn’t process it until she says, “Aren’t you—“ and then he realizes he’s being  _ recognized _ , that she’s seen him on the  _ Late Show  _ or something and is now seeing him kneeling on the ground, covered in blood and weeping. It’s almost, almost funny. 

“Can I please go with him,” he pleads, looking directly at her as he pulls himself out of Bev’s grip, “I can’t leave him alone,” and she nods.   
  


**part three **

When Eddie wakes up in the hospital, he feels like his entire body has been shattered and put back together. He’s pretty sure half his body is covered in bandages, and his arm is in a cast. A cast that’s someone’s written “LOSER” across in unsteady letters. 

“Hey,” Richie’s voice says, from a million miles away, but then Eddie blinks and he’s actually about a foot away, sitting next to Eddie’s hospital bed with dark circles under his eyes and a cup of green Jello. “Eds? Can you hear me?” 

It’s an enormous effort to speak, but Eddie manages it. “Did you write that on my cast, asshole?” he says. 

“I’ll get a nurse,” Richie says hastily, getting up from his chair immediately. “You, you probably need to talk to them, I’ll—“ 

“Did we beat it?” Eddie says. 

Richie pauses, looks at him with an expression so soft it does strange things to Eddie’s heart, although based on the circumstances that could be because he’s dying.

“Yeah,” Richie says fiercely, and Eddie feels a flicker of harsh triumph before Richie says, “We’re safe now.” 

Which isn’t true. There is no safe, especially not in Derry. 

“You saved my life, man,” Richie adds. “You really did. Total hero moment.” 

He laughs. “Yeah, well, you saved mine too. Call it even,” he says, and they look at each other for a long moment. 

Eddie clears his throat. “Richie, look, you should leave and let me talk to the doctors—“ 

“I can stay if you want,” he offers immediately. “I’ve just, you know, been here.” 

Eddie can’t help smiling, thinking of him waiting there even after all the others left. It’s so typically Richie, so stubborn. 

The way he’s looking at Eddie now is open and unguarded. Hopeful. Eddie rememberers, fuzzily, the way he felt when he’d thought they were safe and the way he felt when Richie was kneeling over him as he bled. He’d thought he was going to die, and it had somehow seemed easier to say it then. 

“Go,” Eddie says. “Tell everyone I’m okay and… and then come back.” 

“Alright,” Richie says. “Alright, Eddie, I’ll see you soon.” 

After he’s gone, Eddie stares after him for a long time, has to shake himself out of it before he presses the call button. He doesn’t even think about Myra until the doctors ask him if there’s any family he wants them to call — his phone is shattered somewhere underneath Neibolt Street with a hundred missed calls on it, he assumes. 

He doesn’t hate her, not really, he knows he walked into their fucked-up arrangement with open eyes. Or as open as the eyes of a person who was missing more than half their memories, and didn’t know how to live without someone else telling him what to do, could be. But she’d twisted whatever he’d given her into a weapon she used to control him and he couldn’t live like that, not anymore, not without feeling like it would suffocate him. 

“I’d like to call myself,” he says, knowing it will be the worst conversation of his life, knowing he has to do it anyway. 

—

_ You are such a fucking creep _ , Richie thinks at himself, sitting at Eddie’s bedside again with the rest of the losers’ club surrounding them, all of them talking a mile a minute except, this one time, for him. 

He’d been thinking it the whole time he’d watched Eddie’s unconscious face, knowing he was definitely abusing the power of his local-kid-made-good celebrity to even be there.

It’s not like anything’s going to happen now, he tells himself. They’re going to go back to separate sides of the country and Eddie’s still going to be married and whatever he wanted to say down there, it definitely meant less to him than it did to Richie. It probably always has. 

It’s okay, really. They’re both alive and, if they remember what happened after they go home, they might even talk sometimes. It’s selfish to feel so acutely how much he hasn’t said. 

Ben’s looking over at Richie, he realizes when their eyes abruptly meet, and when they do, Ben says, “Hey, Beverly, will you come with me to the gift shop?” 

“Sure,” she says immediately, and stands up, tugging on Bill’s sleeve as she does. “Come with us, Bill, I bet they have some of your books.” 

Bill looks like he’s going to object, but Beverly gives him a sharp look. “I think I’ll come too,” Mike says. 

“Oh, come on,” Eddie groans, “really subtle, guys,” and they’re alone again a moment later.

Richie remembers him dying. He saw it, in the deadlights. Real as anything, real as what happened to Stan, except that it wasn’t and he was here and he was hurt but blessedly, gloriously alive. 

“Uh,” Richie says. “I don’t think anyone I know back home is gonna want a magnet from the Derry General Hospital gift shop.” 

“No.” Eddie’s head falls back against the pillows. “You know this place doesn’t even take my insurance?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Richie says automatically. “I’ll pay for it.” 

“Rich, I can’t ask you to—“ 

“I said don’t worry about it.” 

Eddie shakes his head, but he doesn’t say anything else. 

Richie’s palms are sweating. He wishes they were anywhere but in a hospital room. “So,” he says eventually, “any big plans for what you’re going to do after you get out of here?” 

Eddie laughs hollowly. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m probably going to get divorced.” 

_ What.  _ “What? Why?”

Eddie’s staring up at the ceiling, avoiding his eyes. “‘Cause I married someone just because I was afraid of dying alone, okay? Congratulations, Richie, you were right.” 

Richie winces. “Look, I’m sorry I said—“ 

“Don’t be.” Eddie sighs and hauls himself into a sitting position, which looks painful.. “There are some things I should tell you,” he says. 

So he tells him, about the guy in college and about being terrified and about his mother dying and going to church and meeting Myra and Richie just listens, feeling his heartbeat in his throat. 

“So that’s it,” Eddie says. He looks relieved to have said it. “And that’s what I can’t be married anymore. Obviously.” 

“God, Eddie, you asshole,” Richie says, laughing. “You really let me think it was just me, huh? That you were living in wedded bliss with a scented candle dealer?” 

“The scented candles aren’t that bad,” Eddie says. He’s smiling, enough that it looks like it might hurt with that knife wound. “And you…”

He trails off. Richie looks down at his hands. “Like I said. I don’t write my own material.” 

“So,” Eddie says. “Do you remember, uh, senior prom?” 

He does, of course he does now. It’s infuriating that he’d ever forgotten. “Yeah. And — you do too?” 

“Yeah.” Eddie’s chewing on his lower lip, nervous, Richie knows. He knows his face so well; twenty years and a stab wound haven’t changed that. “I… When I thought I was, you know, dying. Don’t laugh at me when I say this, Rich, or I swear to god I’ll never talk to you again.” Long, slow breath out. “I was going to tell you I love you.” 

“You — I—“ Richie sputters uselessly, and there’s no good response to it, not really, unless you count saying  _ I love you too, I loved you before I knew what love was and after I forgot who you were _ , and passionately making out in a hospital bed, but that doesn’t seem like a real possibility. “Eddie, look, maybe you did when we were kids, but a lot has changed since then, you don’t really even know me now.” 

“You haven’t changed that much,” Eddie scoffs. “And I didn’t say it then so I’m saying it now, okay? I’ll let you know if it changes.” 

Richie feels absolutely delirious, and more tired than he’s ever been in his whole life. He feels like a thirteen-year-old kid and an eighteen-year-old staring at Eddie in the old clubhouse and a forty-year-old man who’s been alone and scared most of the time since. 

_ It doesn’t work this way, Richie,  _ his own voice in his head says.  _ You don’t just get what you want, not you, not like this,  _ but for the moment at least he tells it to shut the fuck up. 

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, just, uh — keep me posted.” 

They look at each other, and Richie can’t help the huge smile he breaks into. He could look at Eddie forever. He really could.

“Maybe I should’ve gone to California with you,” Eddie says. “I’ve sort of hated my life ever since.” 

“You might’ve hated California too. Los Angeles kind of blows.” 

“Probably,” Eddie agrees, “but you would’ve been there.” 

He reaches for Richie’s hand, and Richie lets him take it. Eddie really is the braver of the two of them, Richie thinks — always was. But he’s determined not to be completely outdown this time, so he leans over and kisses Eddie’s cheek, just above the bandage. 

“God, that’s gonna be an awful scar,” Eddie mumbles. 

“Don’t worry, Eds,” he says, “I’ll always think you’re cute,” and if his voice is choked when he says it, nobody hears it but the two of them. 

—

The weird thing, maybe the weirdest of all of the things that have happened, is that they don’t want to leave Derry at first. Or more accurately, they don’t want to leave each other. 

Bill has to, first — he has a wife and a movie set to get back to in England, and they’ve all overheard what sounded like a few extremely strained phone calls with Audra. It’s got to be hard to explain, to someone else. 

Bill calls Mike twenty-four hours after leaving, as promised, and reports that he hasn’t lost any of the memories, old or new. 

They’re all sitting around a table in a diner Eddie hasn’t been to since he was seventeen and which is just as disgusting now. Eddie is on just enough painkillers that all the injuries amount to a dull, general ache. The cast on his arm has been amended, by Richie while he was asleep the last night before being discharged from the hospital, with a bright red V over the S. There are five signatures on it, and — also by Richie — one cartoon smiley face with hearts for eyes and square glasses. 

“Good,” Ben says firmly when Mike reports back the news. “We won’t forget each other again, then.” He looks at Beverly briefly, then says, “We won’t forget Stan.” 

But even if they don’t forget, Eddie thinks, they’ll end up scattered again, won’t they? The moment they all go their separate ways, the bond of the losers’ club will be broken again. Stan’s absence already feels less strange now that Bill is gone too, like they could’ve biked down the street to rent something from Blockbuster. 

Maybe they’ll just go home and get dragged back into the same old patterns. But it’s dead, Eddie reminds himself, the thing that was haunting him his whole life. It’s dead, so maybe he can be different now. 

After breakfast, Richie insists he has something he wants to show Eddie, alone, and he says it in a serious enough tone that Eddie accepts without demanding to know what it is. 

“I was talking to Bill,” Richie says hesitantly as they drive to the outskirts of Derry.“We thought, you know. We both have too much money, we should do something with it. Something that’ll help people here. I don’t know what people do, community centers or education programs or… something.” 

Eddie narrows his eyes. “What happened to not owing this town anything?”

Richie shrugs. “I keep thinking about the guy that died,” he says. “Adrian Mellon. I don’t think it just goes away, that kind of — hatred. Not because we killed something that lives in the sewers. It’s part of Derry.” He looks distantly toward the horizon. “I think we have to do something so that no other kids here grow up like…” He trails off. 

“Like us.” 

Richie smiles sadly. “I was going to say like Bowers. But yeah. That too.” 

“That’s a good idea,” Eddie says. “That would be — good.” 

It’s weird, being alone with him now. Eddie never really stopped feeling like Richie looking at him was the best and worst thing in the world. 

He doesn’t know how you’d go about calculating the odds of making a relationship work with your childhood best friend you haven’t seen in twenty years, provided that both of you are kind of fundamentally fucked up as people and have spent those twenty years developing really bad coping mechanisms and also recently had to fight an evil clown. He doesn’t think he’d like the odds. 

But some part of him, maybe the part that’s not afraid anymore, tells him it’s not really about what it looks like on paper. It’s him and Richie, and that’s always made more sense than anything else. 

“Here we are,” Richie announces a moment later. He leaps out of the car with nervous energy, and Eddie follows. 

“The kissing bridge? Didn’t Ben almost get murdered here?” 

“Well — yeah.” Richie shifts from one foot to the other, not looking him in the eye. “But I wanted you to see — look, it’s right here.” 

It takes him a minute to process what he’s seeing. It’s one of a hundred carvings cut into the half-rotted wood, and it looks old, faded. For a moment he doesn’t process what the letters mean, and then it hits him like an electric shock. 

“You—“ 

“Yep.” Richie looks embarrassed. 

“When…” 

“That summer, when we were thirteen.” He’s avoiding Eddie’s eyes. “I really thought I was gonna die, y’know, and I couldn’t tell anybody or write you some anonymous poem, so.” 

Eddie remembers what he looked like when he was thirteen, skinny and short and carrying medical supplies everywhere in a fanny pack. He hadn’t even known, at the age, why he felt so horribly different, and Richie had carved their initials right next to Brian + Katie and Sarah loves Jason, and they’d stayed there for twenty-seven years. 

“God, it’s so  _ fucking  _ unfair,” Eddie says quietly. 

Richie looks at him sharply. “What?” 

“I thought I was like, the only gay kid in the world. And you were right there.” His hands are shaking a little. “And it made us fucking forget about each other and it’s been so long and I hate — I hate that.” 

“Hey.” Richie’s hand is on his shoulder. “It’s okay.” 

“It’s not,” Eddie mutters. “It fucking sucks.” 

Richie’s arm loops around his shoulders and pulls him to his side, and Eddie leans against him. “We’re here now, though.” 

They are. They’re alive, and Pennywise and Henry Bowers are dead. 

“C’mere,” Eddie says, and pulls Richie down to his level by his collar. He still looks over his shoulder before kissing him, because it’s still Derry, but he does it. It’s a real kiss this time and he thinks, immediately, that it hasn’t felt this way since he was eighteen. Maybe they were always going to find their way back to each other. He’d like to think so.

“Is this what you want?” Richie says quietly. “Because, I mean, I can go home and try to meet some guy in LA, but I don’t really know anything about Carly Rae Jepsen or like, Equinox. Plus I don’t think they’d really get it about the clown.” 

“You’re such a hack,” Eddie says, fondly. “Yeah, it’s what I want.” 

Richie grins and stands up straighter, looks so happy Eddie can’t even freak out about how crazy all of this is. 

“I have to go back to New York for a while, though,” he says. “I mean, I have stuff with my job I need to figure out… and with Myra…”

He thinks, momentarily guilty, of how she would feel seeing them, and Richie must see it, because he nudges him in the ribs and says, “Hey, don’t worry, Eds, you’re not the first married guy I’ve made out with.” 

“Oh, good,” Eddie says sourly. “Wouldn’t want to think I’m a bad influence on you.” He glances back toward the car and then says, “Do you have a knife?” 

“Uh, yeah. You wanna—“ 

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Make sure it doesn’t fade.” 

—

They go home again, but it isn’t the same. 

There’s a letter waiting when Richie gets home, from Stan. He totally breaks down reading it, picturing Stan writing out six copies in his fastidious handwriting, facing death with that much conviction and still thinking he was a coward. 

He cancels all of his tour dates for the foreseeable future and posts something on Twitter his publicist wrote for him about taking time off to work on his mental health. Everyone probably thinks he’s in rehab, but he doesn’t really care. He’s going to try to write his own material again, try not pretending to be someone else for once. 

Stan’s letter says  _ be proud  _ and Richie thinks he can try. 

Bill wraps up the movie and tells them he’s writing a new book now and he and Audra are going to couple’s counseling. He says he’s thinking about telling her the whole truth, thinks she might even believe him. Mike leaves Derry, sends them all photos of the Grand Canyon and of shitty roadside tourist traps and is clearly equally glad to be seeing all of it. 

Ben goes with Bev to New York, where she files a police report about her piece-of-shit husband, and they send vaguely blurry selfies — Ben always gets part of his thumb over the lense — from all the most tourist-y locations. Eddie’s in some of those photos too, always looking like Ben and Beverly pulled him into the frame. Richie saves one of those as the background on his phone, which is fine. No one’s gonna see it. 

Eddie calls him every night and Richie listens to him rant about meeting with divorce lawyers and hating all his coworkers and loves it, just hearing his voice. 

“I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” Eddie tells him over the phone. “Isn’t that stupid? I’m like, an old man and I don’t even know that.” 

“Are you quitting your job?” Richie asks, trying not to sound hopeful. 

“I don’t know. Probably. It makes me feel crazy all the time. Is it weird,” Eddie says, “if I didn’t expect to live this long? I mean — to be forty.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I just always felt like I would die young, I guess,” he says quietly. “Of something. Even when we were kids, I think I just… couldn’t picture myself in the future. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Richie says heatedly. He’ll say it as often as he has to, until Eddie starts believing it. He hears a sigh on the other end of the line, unsteady. “We’ve been through a lot, man.” 

“Yeah. You still having nightmares?” 

“Mmm-hmm. They’re mostly about Bowers, though.” Which is ridiculous, really. All that effort Pennywise put into terrifying them and Richie is still mostly just scared of a guy who called him names when he was thirteen, a guy he personally ensured isn’t hurting anyone anymore. 

“Mine are about Pomeranians,” Eddie says, and they both laugh, and the silence that follows is comfortable. 

“Still love you, by the way,” Eddie says. “Just an update.” 

Richie hasn’t said it back yet, even though Eddie does practically every time they talk. He doesn’t know why. It’s there, a painful fluttering thing in his chest, but it still feels like if he says it Eddie might sense the enormity of it and how deeply Richie wants this to work, how it’s the only thing in his life he’s really sure of right now. 

“You should quit your job,” he tells Eddie instead. “I’ll be your sugar d—“

“ _ Don’t _ fucking finish that sentence,” Eddie snaps, and Richie laughs. He hasn’t felt this good in twenty years. 

—

A couple months later, Eddie moves out of the mostly unfurnished bachelor pad apartment where he’s been living, and Richie comes to New York to help him pack. 

Together, they stare down the vast array of orange pill bottles spread out across Eddie’s kitchen table. “Some of these are real,” he says defensively. 

“Uh-huh.” Richie picks up one of the bottles and contemplates a label. “Xanax. Okay, you definitely need that. What are Echinacea capsules?” 

“That’s for gluten intolerance.” 

“Well, you don’t have that. And I’m pretty sure this is homeopathic.” 

Eddie sighs, feeling like one of those people on  _ Hoarders  _ who start panicking when someone tries to throw away a stack of old magazines. “Fine. Get rid of it.” 

They go through the rest of them together, and Richie only makes fun of him a little for having so many prescriptions for things he definitely doesn’t have. Not as much as he made fun of him for having Adele’s entire discography on vinyl, at least. It’s nice. 

“You ready to go?” Richie says when all of Eddie’s stuff is packed. 

He looks at Richie, who has a stain on his collar from when they got hot dogs in Central Park with Ben and Beverly earlier, because Richie insisted on going to get hot dogs in Central Park. He’d been recognized by a group of what looked like college kids, and they’d roped Ben into taking pictures of them together on five different phones, Richie looking embarrassed but a little pleased with himself too. 

Bev had leaned over to Eddie while he watched and said, “Hey, we got pretty lucky, right?” 

He looks at Richie, who is the opposite of everything he’s ever told himself he wants, and he thinks that’s truer than even she knows. 

“Let’s go,” he says, and doesn’t look back. 

—

It’s a long drive back to Los Angeles, and they spend pretty much all of it arguing about what to listen to on the radio. Eddie puts on NPR until Richie insists that he can’t stand it anymore, will snap and veer into traffic if he has to hear one more story about the making of a bluegrass fusion album. They listen to about a third of one of Bill’s audiobooks, narrated by the author, until it gets to a supremely weird sex scene and they both say, simultaneously, “What the  _ fuck. _ ”

Richie decides somewhere in the Midwest that the best soundtrack for this roadtrip is nineties pop punk and sings off-key along with most of a Green Day album, batting away all of Eddie’s attempts to reach the volume knob. “You’ve turned into  _ such  _ a poser, dude,” he says. 

“I hate you.”

“You love me.”

He should probably stop bringing that up. Reminding Eddie that he’d said it is just going to give him more chances to realize it was actually a huge, idiotic mistake and he should retract it immediately. And Richie kind of wants to stay in the world where he can believe Eddie Kaspbrak loves him as long as possible.

All Eddie says, though, is, “That doesn’t make this sound any better,” and he changes the Sirius station to one that only plays seventies soft rock. 

The drive is supposed to take about four days, the way Richie planned it, but it’s probably going to end up taking longer because they keep stopping in little towns in the middle of nowhere to see things like the world’s largest ball of paint. They stop for lunch in little diners where Eddie grills the waitresses about their standards of sanitation and whether they use peanut oil. 

“I don’t know him,” Richie says, holding his hand under the table. “He’s just a hitchhiker I picked up. Sorry.” 

He’s been trying to stealthily touch Eddie as much as possible, which is difficult when Eddie insists he keep his hands to himself while driving and they’re mostly driving through little nowhere towns with billboards about how to avoid going to hell. 

In their hotel room that night, though, Eddie grabs the front of his shirt as soon as Richie closes the door and presses him against it, kissing him hard. 

“It’s so hard not to do that all the time,” Eddie says, almost angrily. 

Richie laughs; he had no idea. “Yeah? You mean that?” 

“Of course I do.” He spins Richie around by the front of his shirt, marches him toward the single bed in their room with intense determination in his eyes, and Richie lets himself be led. 

They fall backwards onto the bed together and it’s the greatest feeling in the world, Eddie’s hands pressing into his shoulders, kissing him like he really fucking means it.  _ It’s you _ , Richie thinks deliriously,  _ it’s really you.  _

Eddie pulls back and looks at him seriously, teeth worrying his bottom lip. “I should tell you I’ve never actually done this sober before,” he says ruefully, “might be terrible at it.” 

“Hey,” Richie mutters. He traces his thumb over the scar on Eddie’s cheek, the only remaining sign of what happened to them. “Hey, I — I love you too. I don’t know why it’s so goddamn hard for me to say it, but I should.” 

Eddie’s eyes widen, and he smiles. He kisses Richie again, slower, more like a promise. “I know that,” he says, and Richie thinks maybe they’ll beat the odds on this one. Maybe they’ll be alright. 

  
  



End file.
